While I am not much of a fan of the language itself, it is a thing of the past so it is safe to look at its positive points. If you want to consider the negati

While I am not much of a fan of the language itself, it is a thing of the past so it is safe to look at its positive points. If you want to consider the negatives, context is an important factor. One consideration is most BASIC implementations had to run on systems with very limited resources. On early personal computers, that could be 4 kB or 16 kB of RAM. That limited memory had to support both the editor and editor (which needed some RAM to store its state, even if the software itself was in ROM) as well as contain the user's program. Forget about superfluous syntax. Heck, forget about formatting since it was likely tokenized. Earlier versions of BASIC may have run on systems with more resources, but it was designed for education so those resources would have been shared by many users so I don't see the situation being terribly different. Later implementations did take advantage of additional resources, but the language was already on its way out so the impact would be limited.